#9852 [Com]: Header redirect and db connection cause "CGI misbehaved"

ID: 9852 Comment by: parsnip11 at hotmail dot com Reported By: ron dot baldwin at sourceprose dot com Status: Closed Bug Type: IIS related Operating System: Windows 2000 PHP Version: 4.2.1 New Comment: I'm using windows 2000 advanced server, service pack 3, pentium 2.2 ghz, 512 ram. The Usleep function is working for me intermittently and sometimes solves the problem.... mostly it's effective if I do a javascript redirect as opposed to using the header command. All patches and performance changes mentioned here havent done a thing to change this bug. PHP PEOPLE ---> You have just GOT to open this bug up. I can only work with iis in my current enviornment and not being able to do redirects with PHP is just crippling my applications. Huffing that Microsoft's products are broken is not an acceptable solution. This exactly the kind of thing that make managers say "I told you it should have been done in asp... enough with your goofy php!". please fix this bug! Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-04-08 04:14:49] jitse dot groen at grib dot nl Dear all, I'm probably not as experienced in PHP as all of you but I found a solution that *seems* to work fine for our sites. I base this on tests with doit.php by frankielam. I should also mention running iisreset once in a while decreased the number of CGI errors per day. It takes about 1-2 weeks for the bug to become noticable to us. It is present before that time but will not show that often. Changing performance to optimize for applications I really cannot consider. How can reducing the speed of our servers be a solution? A possible solution though: After increasing the paging file size (virtual memory) I cannot reproduce the bug however often I try. I'm not absolutely convinced that this will do the trick, but for now, it works. I would be anxious to hear your experiences with this solution. With kind regards, Jitse Groen, The Netherlands ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-03-21 07:31:33] lewid at nc dot rr dot com Thank you very much for all you comments, Ottawa67! I have implemented ISAPI using php4isapi.dll in our production environment now and it appears to work perfectly and has solved the problem we were having. I will contribute any bugs I encounter but so far it is working ... perfectly! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-03-20 17:10:36] ottawasixtyseven at hotmail dot com Lewid, php4isapi.dll works perfectly for some people. We are part of the unfortunate group that experiences lots of server 500 errors. Here is an excerpt from the latest PHP INSTALL text file: _________________________________________________ PHP 4 for Windows comes in two flavours - a CGI executable (php.exe), and several SAPI modules (for exapmle php4isapi.dll). The latter form is new to PHP 4, and provides significantly improved performance and some new functionality. However, please note that the SAPI modules are *NOT* yet considered to be production quality. In particular, with the ISAPI module, you are likely to encounter serious reliability problems especially on platforms older than W2K - you may witness a lot of server 500 errors and suffer from other server modules such as ASP also failing. You have been warned! The reason for this is that the PHP SAPI modules are using the thread-safe version of the PHP code, which is new to PHP 4, and has not yet been tested and pounded enough to be considered completely stable, and there are actually a few known bugs. On the other hand, some people have reported very good results with the SAPI modules, and there a few reports of problems with the Apache module version. In short - your mileage may vary; If you need absolute stability, trade the performance of the SAPI modules with the stability of the CGI executable. _________________________________________________ Hopefully you can be part of the increasing numbers that are actually able to give php4isapi.dll a good pounding. Please make sure to report any problems you have with it. Ottawa ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-03-20 15:28:49] lewid at nc dot rr dot com What bugs are there in php4isapi.dll (referring to above comment)? I am using an isapi filter pointing to php4isapi.dll and it seems to have fixed the cgi issue completely in my development environment. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2003-03-20 12:30:21] ottawasixtyseven at hotmail dot com I have PROVEN beyond a shadow of a doubt that IIS can't handle multiple simultaneous connections to ANY CGI !!!! It's not the fault of PHP.EXE I've compiled the C code that's listed below and put it in C:\Inetpub\Scripts. If you would like a copy of the compiled exe drop me a line. For the sake of simplicity, this program is designed to be initially called with no parameters as in http://localhost/Scripts/breakiis.exe Also, for simplicity, I don't bother following the conventional name=value&name=value format of the URL string parameters but simply pass a number. This code is perfectly safe in that it will start the count at 1 if no parms are passed and if a QUERY_STRING that is non-numeric is passed, atof will return 0.0 so that is also safe. This program fully complies with the rules of CGI programming via the GET method in that it receives the URL string parameters via QUERY_STRING and sends back output via cout with a valid header. You will see that running one instance of this in the browser will work fine. Run multiple instances and you will break IIS. This program is designed to do nothing more than prove that there is a flaw in the way that IIS handles CGI processes and that the bug is in fact with IIS and not PHP. You *CANNOT* break Apache with multiple instances of this CGI code: ______________________________________________________ #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <math.h> char *data; double count; int main(void) { data = getenv("QUERY_STRING"); if(data == NULL) count=1; else count = atof(data); printf("Content-Type:text/html\n\n"); printf("Loading page with value %f\n",floor(count)); count++; printf("<script>location.href='breakiis.exe?%f'</script>",count); return 0; } _______________________________________________________ I have launched yet another campaign to try and get Microsoft to fix this problem but honestly I think we'd have better luck just working out the bugs in php4isapi.dll. Maybe in the year 2025 Microsoft will get around to fixing this problem. Ottawa ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at http://bugs.php.net/9852 -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=9852&edit=1